Car Safety Evolved For the Better, Despite Some Terrible Ideas

A look at some of the highs, and lows, of the constantly changing world of safe cars.

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Given the generally claptrap nature of the earliest automobiles, it's not exactly surprising that as soon as Americans began driving cars, they also began to be killed by them. Before the dawn of the 20th century, there were already more than two dozen motor vehicle deaths. That escalated into the five-digit range in the late Teens, and the 50,000-range in the 1970s (before beginning a marked decline).

Even in the hands of an expert driver, a car can occasionally become a large, high-speed projectile. When piloted by drunk, distracted idiots, that risk only increases. Multiply that by all the miles we drive across our sprawling nation every year, our historical aversion to proper driver education, our entrepreneurial spirit, and our love of solutions that address effects while ignoring causes, and you can easily understand why automotive safety devices have proliferated here in the USA.

Many of these were extremely useful, if quite slow in arriving. The first turn signals didn't show up until Buick launched them in 1937. The first front seat belts didn't appear until Tucker installed them in his experimental car in 1948—ditto for the padded dashboard—and these features didn't become common options until the '50s or '60s. Despite millions of avoidable fatalities, mandatory seat belt laws were fought tooth-and-nail by auto manufacturers, and didn't appear until 1984. A similar bout of safety advocacy and industry resistance predated the 1989 front-airbag legislation. Some 300,000 lives have been saved in the past 40 years by these two relatively simple devices.

Of course, not every safety innovation was as successful—or well designed. In fact, many were downright moronic, if not dangerous. One of the earliest was the 1907 O'Leary Fender, a sort of mesh cow-catcher (er, human catcher) that bolted to the front of your vehicle and was meant to shovel pesky pedestrians aside. (It didn't.) Just a decade later, the Pennsylvania Rubber Company sucked up a major failure when it tried to improve vehicle handling by adding scores of tiny suction cups to its tires' contact patches. (Roads were quite new at this point, as, apparently, was any concept of physics.) And Malcolm Bricklin—the man who unleashed atrocities like the Subaru 360 and the Yugo upon the American public —pioneered the use of lurid paint as an alleged impact avoidance enhancer in his failed SV-1 safety vehicle.

But our favorite stupid safety features have to be the ones predicated on some sort of movement in the car during the accident. In response to an automotive safety report by the Cornell University Aeronautical Research Lab in the mid 1950s, Ford created a concept car in which the front seats swiveled around and faced the rear during—or preferably, and mysteriously, before—a crash, allegedly shielding passengers from impact. Insane, yes, but this was still an improvement over visionary Preston Tucker's big idea. In his iconic, rear-engined, helicopter-powered 48 sedan, he designed a padded "crash compartment" into which riders could crawl when a collision was imminent. They do say that time slows down during a wreck, right?

Nowadays, we have a host of computer-aided safety features to keep us from veering out of our lane, backing up into another vehicle, running into the car in front of us, flipping over, spinning out, or generally doing anything dumb (or fun). And if future predictions are true, we can soon look forward to cars that will be able to drive themselves. Hopefully, the microprocessors that control them won't be trained in the same driver's ed programs as most Americans.